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Pegasus and Mercury Circling the Drain
Daemon Duck writes "One of the web's oldest and most respected email clients is flickering out of existence. Pegasus mail and its companion SMTP server, Mercury32, have been discontinued due to lack of funding for the ongoing development. On the website, the author David Harris states that if some funding becomes available he would consider opening the source code or continuing the development."
port.ac.uk finally migrating away, was it? :P
I was a user of pegasus for the longest time. In fact, I switched from pegasus to thunderbird only last year when i learned i could finally manage multi-pop using thundy. I for one am going to miss the pegasus.
Peace and happyness to you, by LullySing
If the funding has dried up, and he's prepared to move on to other things, why not open it? Pegasus was my first mail client, and I for one would like to see it bloom as an open source package rather than die a slow, horrible death as abandonware.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
I went to the web page and see that, as reported by Scuttle Monkey, the author says he might continue working on it or make it open source with some funding. What does funding have to do with making it opern source? He could make it open source today if he really wanted to. It just seems to me that he's yet another guy who's pissed off that he can't make a living off the internet, so he's holding his source code hostage. I have to admit I know nothing about his program, but I fail to see the connection between open source and him getting paid.
From TFA:
if sponsors could be found to provide modest ongoing funding, I would be happy to
continue developing the programs, and would even consider opening the source.
-------------
Does it cost to open the source? It's not as simple as opening a SourceForge account and posting the source under the GPL?
One might be inclined to think Pegasus is flickering out of existance because is isn't open source. I remember early on moving from Pegasus to Eudora email because Eudora's simplicity and features were better. When Eudora became an advertisement-laden mess, the open source Thunderbird showed up to fill the gap and I haven't looked back. Now Thunderbird offers in-place spell-check and other features which were considered very advanced just a few years ago. Evolution in action.
{ - Generic Guy - }
It was a godsend for me when I first found it. Working for a rural publisher meant we got *big* files down our 56k line. The ability to see and manipulate the mail queue for those of us not fortunate enough to be on *nix was truly empowering. There was no webmail, no alternative. We had been downloading 30Mb files overnight to try and get at our email... Heh. Good old simple "viruses come on floppies" days :)
see the look of inconsolable sadness on my face: :-)
Too bad my university won't have migrated away to a proper email system (by which I mean one where I can access my email from outside uni by using something other than squirrelmail) by the time I leave.
FGD 135
It is official; Slashdot now confirms: *Pegasus is dying
/. confirmed that *Pegasus market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all clients. Coming close on the heels of a recent /. survey which plainly states that *Pegasus has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *Pegasus is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *Pegasus community when
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *Pegasus' future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Pegasus faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Pegasus because *Pegasus is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Pegasus. As many of us are already aware, *Pegasus continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
There can no longer be any doubt: Pegasus is dying.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
When this story was on Digg last week I said the same thing: I really hope he decided to open source both pieces of software. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
>I have to admit I know nothing about his program,
>but I fail to see the connection between open
>source and him getting paid.
1. One or more people want it to be open-sourced.
2. The author (like you, unless perhaps you are
a monk) wants money.
An exchange either will or won't happen.
If there aren't enough people in #1 above, or if they
don't want it badly enough to pay, then maybe he will
eventually give it away for free, like something that
wouldn't sell in a garage sale or on EBay.
He doesn't have to give his work away for free if
he doesn't want to.
He may be considering the inevitable time investment that would come from helping people actually understand the released source. Or (though less likely), there may be IP rights involved.
And he already had a support structure in place as well, to make money off. Assuming users migrated away from Pegasus to other clients because of features that he couldn't provide as a single programmer, he may even make more money opening the source. Provided it's picked up by a community, of course.
Indeed!
It hasn't been important since Eudora was freed, and it's been totally, utterly, and completely irrelevant to all but DOS users (no idea if pmail for dos is even still around) since Thunderbird came out and made Eudora irrelevant.
pmail was highly useful back in the DOS days as it was the only free-as-in-beer client to come with a GREAT DEAL of functionality. A lot of Novell/DOS shops used it for just this reason; it even played well with Netware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd hazard a guess that it was something one of the editors used long ago, and he got sentimental readint the articles. I think I may have heard of it.. never used it. slightly puzzled over the 'most respected' title it's picked up. I have little respect and mostly loathing for anything PC based. but that's hardly a shock to most. :)
even the magic 8 ball has an opinion on email clients: Outlook not so good.
I run my own mail server at home for myself, my friends and my wife's small business. Does anyone have any suggestions on decent replacements for Mercury32 that run on Windows? I know I could find lots at SourceForge, but I'm hoping to tap in to the experience people have here to strip out the ones that are less useful.
And no, moving to Linux is not an option at this time.
...but BSD was plugging up the drain hole. Or so I've been told from time to time.
Moving something to open source and give it a chance at survival is a lot of work. I tried to move a bunch of my libraries to open source only to discover a total lack of documentation; not just API but architectural. If its put out without polish, its DOA.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the lack of funding indicate that nobody wants to use it anymore? Free market in action and all that?
Further, what would Pegasus do that thunderbird or outlook doesn't do? Would it be better money spent writing custom plugins for thunderbird?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This will be worse than the end of the horse-drawn zeppelin! Mark my words!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
"What does funding have to do with making it open source? He could make it open source today if he really wanted to. It just seems to me that he's yet another guy who's pissed off that he can't make a living off the Internet, so he's holding his source code hostage."
I used to use this program a long time ago. It was a very good program.
1. Holding it hostage? He wrote it so he can do with it what he wants.
2. He did a lot of work. He would like to get paid for his work so funding is important. Things like food, mortgage, health care....
So it comes down to this. He will sell his work to the community if they pay him. It is his work so he has that right. If no one wants it enough to pay for it he is going to walk a way. If you don't like it use thunderbird.
These programs have been around for a long time. I used it on a Novell V3 system for email.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Well, it's important because David Harris has been producing a very high-quality gratis email client for Windows for nearly 17 years, funded entirely by voluntary manual purchases and support subscriptions, and he cannot do so any longer. For an idea of exactly how advanced the capabilities of Pegasus Mail are, take a look at his still-available-if-you-know-where-to-look Overview page, and especially at the "history of Pegasus Mail" link thereon.
So far as opening the source goes, I'd love to see it happen (actually, I'd love to see someone hire him to run it as an open-source project), but I don't know how dynamic a community could be forged around a Win32 codebase that I understand to be optimized for performance and minimum resource use over modularity, portability, and ease of future development.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Old dinosaurs wither...
Pegasus mail was great when it started. Then a Windows version emerged, with was potent, flexible and useful, despite some quirks (you could not select anything less than a line in message text -- this gave me the habit I still follow to put URLs in e-mails on a single line without unrelated text).
But it is obviously a product that evolved by slapping-on additions haphazarldy; the configuration was nothing but unified. Related features were spread accross several configuration screens amongst several configuration options, without a grand master plan.
In the end, it was a sorry kluge that was easily replaced by other clients (Eudora, Thunderbird) who eventually evolved to Pegasus' capabilities, but without the configuration nightmare.
So it arrived at it's natural end of life. It cannot compete against nimbler and swifter clients, so it now belongs in the annals of internet paleontology as a reverable footnote, much as the Great Eastern does in steamship paleontology or The Rocket in locomotive paleontology.
R.I.P. Pegasus, you won't be forgotten, but certainly not missed.
It's time to move on. Perhaps Mr Harris could bring his expertise and experience to Thunderbird, where he would be more than welcome.
I loved Pegasus and ran it on all of my office's workstations. I remember a few years ago the author, after being bombarded by Linux users, stated in a FAQ that he would never open source the software.
I used it several years ago. It worked pretty well, but I think I abandoned it because it had either no or poor IMAP support.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I subscribe to the Mercury mailing list and last week David Harris (the author of Mercury and Pmail) posted a message about the future semi-commercial direction Mercury would take in 2007. There was one follow-up post that complained (in a polite way) about having to pay and David, in my opinion, went off the deep end. That same day he posted on pmail.com that they were both discontinued.
The only money he ever asked for Mercury was for a set of manuals. I never needed a set of manuals, Mercury is easy to set up and use, and of course the mailing list is a good resource. I think a Donate button in Pegasus and Mercury would have kept him much more interested. As someone on the Mercury list said, if Pegasus Mail has 1 million users and everyone donated a dollar, that would make things much more interesting. Mercury was stagnating, new versions were few and far between.
You can't just open source software, there is work to do to open source it. First, you have to inspect the licenses of any module/code that you include to make sure that it is open sourceable. You also have to have a build system in place that works with open source. Is it truly open source, if you have to buy Microsoft's Visual Studio to build it?
I finally got the source code for Post Road Mailer (native OS/2 application). Before I can start working on it, I have to build a project file for Visual SlickEdit, then linting (or is it de-lint) it, then port it over to Watcom or Gcc. There may be some legal some issues that prevent me from open sourcing it, but I hope to get it working well enough to start distributing it -- legally, free as in beer.
Fight Spammers!
You can find more detailed information on this move the following link, by a Pegasus Mail beta tester:
. html
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/dh_upd1
By the way, I'd love to see Pegasus Mail open sourced. It's a marvelous e-mailing package. It's UI isn't the most intuitive around, but once you get used to it, it becomes a very powerful tool for your mail needs. Many years ago I evaluated a lot of e-mail softwares, including Eudora, and ended up choosing Pegasus Mail. It's really worth it.
I would surely help if a fund for purchasing and open sourcing it was established.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I guess he could just toss the code out to the wolves after striping out the editor but it would honestly just die at that time.
Not sure why he wouldn't do this at least to begin with; I think it would quiet a lot of the skeptics (myself included) who aren't particularly swayed by the thought that he would "consider" making it open source given appropriate funding. Stripping out the editor but opening the rest might actually be a good way to spur development because it gives a tractable problem to some other programmer: figure out a way to shoehorn an existing open-source editor, or a new one, in place of the one that's been removed. Sounds like a good thesis project for a comp-sci student somewhere.
I don't fault the guy for wanting to make money, I really don't. (I work on closed-source software to pay the bills, and we don't even give it away free-as-in-beer.) But he's not going to win any friends by holding the code effectively hostage; since he's not known as being an OSS developer, he's going to have to take the first step if he wants to receive funding from people who are ideologically motivated in that direction. A good first step would be opening up whatever code is his to release in whatever form it's currently in, just to prove that he's not playing Pit and the Pendulum with the Delete key on the whole project.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sad news. I used pegasus from the moment I had an email address until I discovered thunderbird. Thanks to pegasus my house was never tainted by any incarnation of Outlook.
In the year since I moved to an Apple machine I've come to understand how solid and useful Pegasus Mail had become. In twelve months I've moved from Apple Mail (which I found much too limited), to Eudora (what a bizarre interface, at least for me) to Thunderbird, and now to Gyazmail.
Each of these lacks at least a couple of must have features that I used extensively on Pmail. Thunderbird tries hard, but it always seems that the feature that I need most isn't quite finished.
Gyazmail comes close, but still has some gaping weaknesses, like the apparent inability to add addresses to the Addressbook from within the program, and a good Search function.
Ultimately Pegasus was probably best loved by those who live and breathe e-mail, and who need power and flexibility, as well as reliability. yes it was free, but it was one of those programs that I would have paid for because it suited my needs so well.
Three Squirrels
I was a long-time user who shifted to Thunderbird in the last year because Tbird handled IMAP better. However, I continue to miss the power of Pegasus Mail's filtering system -- for me it was easy to set up, easy to understand, and could do a lot. Thunderbird's system doesn't even come close (it seems easy to set up but does not work consistently or automatically and refuses to be applied to anything but the inbox).
Not only that. The original was for DOS, is still around, and able to do both POP/SMTP as well as Netware mail. Same thing for the Windows 3.1 client, which can still be found and still works pretty well.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Back in the late 80's I worked at a college that ran Netware (3.12) and everyone, from the dean to the part-time night students used the DOS version as their email client. It was rock solid. At that time I would hazard a guess that many colleges and universities which ran Netware and DOS machines used Pegasus as well.
I was quite sad to read its being discontinued.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I wont miss the client (ugggh!) But I will miss the server, one of the better free email servers for windows based solutions.
I generally use webmail these days but I still use pegasus to download and archive mail. However my wife uses pegasus exclusively, and she won't be happy about switching. Plus we have hundreds of megabytes of pmail archives. It's been a solid and reliable program, never had a need or desire to switch.
Ah well, guess it's time to look at alternatives. People say good things about thunderbird... it'll have to be a client with an open mail archive format, so I can hack a conversion script. (Pmail is easy, it's just a slightly modified unix format.)
I'm glad that both of them are going to die. I'm glad that I was able to stop supporting both years ago.
The only people who stayed with them for any time at all is the type of person who enjoys ugly over-complex tools.
Very sorry to hear of the demise of Pegasus. I used Pegasus for many, many years, and had family members using it as well. It is only in the last year or so that I stopped use of Pegasus, as I found Thunderbird to be a more full-featured mail client. While I was using it, it was the tops, better than anything else I had tried. Farewell, Pegasus, you will be missed.
Mr David Harris, I was a user of Pegasus Mail for years because was lightweight and other features, then moved to Eudora, and then Thunderbird, and finally Gmail.
Thanks for your good work!
--Tei
-Woof woof woof!
That is all fine and dandy, but today ther are no less than 30 Open source apps that already do what pegasus does and more. This is not like Blender where there was no decent 3d app for Linux, there is a mountian of email apps that are as good as or better than pegasus.
I know some people still like it, but in my mind it is certianly not worth it even if he open sourced it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> Gee he has provided this software FREE of CHARGE for 16+ years.
Which kind of demonstrate why I prefer to use free software vs. merely gratis software. Free software will live on as long as their is an interest, while merely gratis software depend solely on the owners ability to find a way to justify continuing the work on it.
The BlitzMail system at Dartmouth is also being replaced. There is a real sense of loss when these things get replaced, at least for geeks like me. I probably spent as much time blitzing people as I did with any of my classes. These systems--and on campus Blitz is basically your number 1 conduit to other students--are really serving the role of a "3rd Place" that coffee shops and bars and such try to fill. It will be like the day that MySpace goes offline: People spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with it. It's an important character in the history of your life.
Will the day ever come that we treat works of great software engineering with the same reverence that we treat 'traditional' forms of engineering? If someone unearthed an Abacus they would giddily rush it to their local museum. If they unearthed pristine copies of VisiCalc floppies they would probably be pissed off that somebody buried trash in their back yard.
so he's holding his source code hostage
Holding his *own* source code hostage? How does one hold something they own hostage?
It's his right to release it or not release it; it is not your implied right to have access to the source code of something you didn't develop.
I'm done with POP mail pretty much altogether- I'm tired of server settings, and odd issues with clients connecting, and updates to a program freaking out my connection to the mailserver, etc etc. I use Thunderbird at work only because it's the reccomended method (read: ensures no one can claim delays any different from the rest). When I pop onto Gmail (with lots of auto-spam filtering) or indeed Hotmail (set to Exclusive mode for registrations, etc), my mail just works.
And I can check it at work, or at home, on pretty much whatever OS I please and I never have to worry about carrying my settings, or what client is available, or whether my mails are deleting from the server, or firewalls- unless freemail is blocked of course, in which case POP mail certainly would be as well anyway, making it a moot point.
As far as I'm concernt, POP mail altogether needs to be seen as a dinosaur. There has got to be a better way. Personally, it's Gmail.
Even if Pegasus itself goes away, the indelible mark it leaves on many subsequent clients will still be here.
Have you read my journal today?
I am sorry to see you won't be continuing the program. Open sourcing is a nice idea, but my guess is it will then become a weak Eudora or Thunderbird copy.
I wish you all the best in your future. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
I thought Eudora was being merged with Thunderbird?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I thought the story was about Battlestar Galactica until I read the summary. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Whilst Pegasus might be the better known product Mercury, to my mind, was better. I ran our 50 odd seat business with Mercury as the primary POP3/SMTP/IMAP server for years. Whilst we are spoilt for choince with great free mailservers in the *NIX world, they are few and far between for Windows. I moved on to Communigate for the main domain, but still use Mercury internally and its so relaible its easy to forget its there.
I hope David reconsiders, theres surely a place for a small, battleproven mailserver in the Windows world. I'll miss Mercury if I finaly have to move on entirely.
Eudora is being replaced by Thunderbird. AFAIK they plan to develop any functionality missing in Thunderbird, and call the result Eudora.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A small consulting company that I know of in central Illinois used Pegasus way back in the mid 90s and used the term "PMail" instead of "EMail" in their conversations... ala "Did you read that PMail I sent you?" This was even funnier after they migrated to Outlook and kept on using "PMail"! Some of their folks still use the term to this day!
Some time ago, I wrote a Perl-based mail program called PMail. The Pegasus folks decided that, despite their product never having been called that, they "owned" the name and threatened me with a lawsuit to make me change its name. I'm glad to see them finally swirl the drain.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Pegasus handles my secondary email, and my parents' primary email. It's always suited us, becase we're juggling multiple mail accounts and identities, but don't need to be "locked apart" from each other (sometimes it works nicely that my dad can read my mum's emails - she's happy for him to do so, etc.).
Can anyone offer any insight on exporting the masses of back emails out to some other client? (We can probably switch to Thunderbird I guess, if we can take our old emails with us)
If his code looks anything like mine, he's just too damn embarassed to show the world his tangled mess of strings, variables, and "Mystery Science Theater 3000" references that can only be called "code" due to its inarguable existence as electronic data that someone could tentatively try to run through a magical compiler if one were extraordinarily optimistic that the whole wretched thing would somehow do something not all that far from its intended function without damaging anything or anyone else near the computer desk physically or emotionally.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"What? He's given you years of updates for free. What could he possibly owe you? If anything, you owe him."
"Worst. Email client. Ever."
Those three attributes have always been my term for something that gets the job done, but may be a little ugly.
I set my wife's biz up with Thunderbird, but there's two big areas we still use Pegasus for:
1) Quick forms, such as notifications of shipment, are impossible to do in T-bird without significant XUL programming
2) So far as I am aware, T-bird still doesn't do mailing lists where the "To" address shows as a list name, rather than listing out all the recipients
It's got its problems (command line creation of mail messages re-wraps the source message, rather badly too), but it's been dependable.
If it goes away, it will be missed.
Design for Use, not Construction!
And I forgot, you have to remove the obscene language used in variable names and comments such as "// my %%@!! boss XX must be on drugs if he thinks that I will do this."
Fight Spammers!
Although I don't haven't used it beyond testing, I must say it's the easiest to install and configure email server I've tried. Exchange 2003, for comparison, was and still is a nightmare.
I've supported many users in PMail for the last few years, and here's my take on it
Good:
Highly Configurable: It is the Linux of mail clients compared to Outlook/Thunderbird
Mailing Lists: Easy to make, use, etc
User Interface: Solid interface, easy to use, if not the prettiest on the block
Bad:
Hard to configure: Ever tried to walk a user through setting up an account? Not quite a cakewalk.
Chokes on large email: If a user tries to send a large (>10MB) attachment, PMail will send it, and then either crash on it being stuck in the message queue or choke on the bounce since it is too large. Only way around that is to manually remove the offending file directly out of the mailbox location (again, ever tried to do that over the phone).
Hard to migrate to/from: Right now, the best we can do is set up an IMAP connection back to the mailbox, and then drop the mail there. I hope we find something better soon, or moving away from it will be a nightmare.
Bottom line: It was great, it served a purpose, but for most users today, Thunderbird makes a much better choice. It is easy to install/configure/troubleshoot, and so closely resembles Outlook Express that most users cannot tell the difference.
I'm sure that David Harris has his reasons, but I say it is about time. Thunderbird is just too mature to compete with anymore.
While I can understand the need to eat and keep a roof over one's head while continuing to provide and improve free software, how much does it cost to simply open source the code?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I was a pegasus user in the early 90's, and I was very happy about it. After I made Linux my primary desktop, one of my biggest disappointments was that I couldn't keep using Pegasus.
Now, I understand the reasons why David Harris decided that opening the source was not an option, and I don't mean to criticise him.
However, IMO the story of Pegasus/Mercury highlights one of the biggest virtues of Free SW (possibly, the biggest in the long run) as opposed to free beer/closed source: the project becomes independent of the people behind it, at least in principle. If David Harris decides to call it a day, well, that's the end of Pegasus. If Linus is run over by a car (god forbid), sure it would be a big blow to linux, but there is no question that linux as a project would continue to thrive.
I am still a Pegasus user. I like its simplicity and immunity to viruses. Occasionally even Eudora was susceptible. Outlook is junk, but I have not tried the 2003 version yet.
Pegasus is still an excellent product for most users, but this is in a way similar to the Netscape story.
cause it needs some extra hands on deck. It is awfully buggy and likes to crash with bigger attachments. BTW conversion tools are available, you just have to look for them. Or you can just create a unix format mailbox under pegasus, move your files you want to that, and convert it to what you want from there.
I used it with Novell servers in 1997 and it worked right out of the box;frankly i was shocked and pleased. I also used it as my first POP3 client and liked it, but like most of the world eventually migrated to Outlook for email. It is just too convenient to have calendar/tasks/contacts and email all in one place.
no comment
What about the 'orrible lil' Mutt? I'm sure Mutt is just as bad as Pegasus - ideal for people who like to suffer...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well, pmail predates mutt dramatically... but yes, mutt is a good test-based email client. It was the last one I used in fact :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I agree.
. html
Your posts are a breath of fresh air among some of the cynicism and ingratitude in here.
I used to use Pegasus a fair bit and bought a manual at one time, because I felt some kind of obligation for getting it. But, like many others, I haven't used the program much for a long time. I think it was difficult for one man to keep up with larger teams on other projects. I suspect David Harris was actually in a difficult financial position, because fewer people were buying manuals - about his only source of revenue as the program was free, because that was what he had wanted it to be from the beginning. And he had to live on that and pay the expenses for running Pegasus. I think he had taken on some support staff, too - so they were dependent on him. It seems nothing short of scandalous to me that some slashdot readers should slander the man and call him "mercenary", because he's got into financial difficulties through providing software free of charge and providing jobs for others and doesn't think he can carry on without assistance. I think it's also been difficult for David Harris to see something that people were once grateful for turn into something that people direct carping criticism at, as the online world has changed. Added to which there seems to be some suggestion that he has personal problems in his life to deal with as well.
In a letter to his beta testing team explaining his decision he describes himself as having a "knot in my stomach is so large at the moment that I can barely type".
The letter is here:
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/dh_upd1
I think it's disgraceful that slashdot readers should badmouth a man like this, who has done so much for so many over such a long time.
I've just heard on Slashdot about the end of Pegasus Mail and Mercury. Being often in the Linux and OS X worlds, I liked PMail and it seemed extremely well written, but I was never the most hardcore user. I never had a need to use Mercury. I'm also a professional developer.
If you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll explain why I think you should probably Open Source these products. Not because it's good for the world, but because it's good for YOU. (I do think your creations have been good for the world, and I do think open sourcing them would be good for the world, but that isn't my main point.)
I wouldn't tell someone selling commercial software and making a big profit that it'll be better for them if it's Open Source. Indeed, if you promptly get a substantial monetary offer for continuing it or for selling the codebase I can understand why you might do that. But if you don't get one promptly, people are going to start migrating away in droves - so the chances are going to rapidly go down, not up.
You have basically two assets: A codebase and a userbase. (I'll include publicity with your userbase.) There are also many free competitors to your products. You have tough decisions to make that seem to involve: How can I turn these assets into money? Simply closing it down doesn't get you any money.
You could open source this project with minimal cost. As I understand there may be portions you can't release that way, simply remove them. With some luck, enough people will want to help that they'll fix it. If you strike while the iron is hot and you still have many users, I think this is quite likely. If it doesn't happen, you aren't out anything but a few hours work, and the world has your code. If so few people cared about it, you probably weren't going to get any more for it. But if it does happen:
1. You can continue to release new versions of the software, even if you do minimal work on it yourself. By keeping it alive, you set yourself up to continue getting support contracts, and you'll still be the prime source for them. (If you aren't charging enough for the support contracts, that's an independent problem...)
2. Since you have already created the majority of the code, you can use a MySQL type dual license, which would allow you to release embedded versions of the code for someone else to wrap into a closed-source pay product. This is a niche that a pure-GPL product can't fill.
3. You could even simply put up some ads on the site.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Here's the thing.
Sometimes life requires you to change tunes. It will force changes from within and from without, and this is done so that you can embrace new lessons and new challenges. The more people cling to old, known and comfortable patterns, the harder the Universe kicks you to move; the more staying in one spot turns into an exercise in suffering.
To David: I know how hard this can be, and I offer you my respect and love, but I think you will find that you will be much happier when you settle your mind and focus on new challenges. The way is open and promising, opportunity doesn't just knock once at the door; it is pounding loud every day. So ask yourself; "What do I REALLY want to do? What idea excites me?"
Don't let ego or preconceptions about yourself get in the way. Even if your heart's desire is to become a grocery store clerk, people will support you and love you for your choice if it is truly what excites you. You can do ANYTHING. We all can.
Good luck! You wont need it.
-FL
I bear David Harris no personal ill will, but speaking as someone who was largely responsible for the primary mail infrastructure at a large university during the mid to late 1990s, and thus had to deal with collateral damage caused by Mercury Mail, I fervently hope that the disks containing the Mercury Mail source code are smashed into pieces. Furthermore, I hope those pieces are placed in steel containers, filled with concrete, and then dropped into a deep oceanic trench.
The only reason why MM mail existed was because it filled a void: it was a mail (SMTP) server that ran on Novell NetWare. And to paraphrase Dennis Ritchie, MM filled that void, and still sucked.
Consider the following facts about MM:
The first issue (being an open relay by default) deserves no further comment.
The "everything queues first" strategy is why the delay between successive queue runs was insanely short by default; otherwise outbound messages would have to sit in the queue for a while until the next queue run picked them up and delivered them.
But because MM kept no state about messages in the queue, for each queue run, it would treat every message as new. That didn't matter for successful deliveries or permanent failures, but God help you if a MM server were trying to relay a message to you and you tempfailed it, because MM would retry again and again and again, and send a DSN ("bounce") message to the sender every single damn time.
So, here was the recipe for my misery: some doofus in some department on campus would bring up a new Mercury Mail server. They'd figure out they needed to list our mail server as the "relay server" in order for outbound mail to work, but they wouldn't know to change any of the other batshit default settings. Inevitably, a spammer would discover that this shiny new MM server was an open relay, wait until Friday evening (even better if it were over a holiday), and start using it to spam. Sooner or later, the spammer would send a message with a (forged) envelope sender whose domain would timeout if you tried to verify it (look it up in DNS). MM would cheerfully accept it and attempt to relay it to us; we'd tempfail that message. MM would then generate a DSN to that bogus sender and send it via relaying it to us, which we'd accept, but would be forced to queue because we couldn't resolve the recipient's domain. The next time MM ran its queue (usually, in just a few seconds), we'd get other DSN.
The result is that MM became not just a mail loop, but a mail generator. If I were lucky, I'd catch the problem before I left work on Friday. If I weren't, there'd be hundreds of thousands of the DSN messages clogging our mail queues before Monday morning rolled around, which was a gigantic mess to clean up.
I felt like I was playing Whack-A-Mole in hell: every time I'd smack down one of the MM servers, another one would spring up a few weeks later and the pattern would repeat again. I eventually just resorted to blacklisting all MM servers as soon as I discovered them. This often wound up pissing off some such-and-such important professor, but it was the only way I could protect the mail infrastructure.
Maybe David Harris has made MM less drain-bamaged since then. (I don't care; I've since moved on.) But I
Your bank is insolvent.
Taking Money Back
I used Pegasus for years. Probably the best feature was the filtering rules and their integration with the distribution lists. Back in the 90s, I was able to use a ruleset to essentially make Pegasus Mail a listserver, managing a list of over 5,000 subscribers.
But, yes, as time passed, Pegasus was passed in so many other areas by commercial and OSS apps that eventually about the only advantage it had were those powerful rulesets and they just did not make up for its shortcomings in other areas.
I bought the manuals twice to support it, but eventually had to switch off of Pegasus. And I'm sort of glad I switched to Thunderbird about a year before I switched to Mac, because when I switched to Mac, moving my entire Thunderbird between platforms set-up was pretty easy. Moving all my mail and multiple accounts with Pegasus would have been a bear.
I still miss a few Pegasus features, but overall, it was time for it to step up or sit down.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Pegasus mail was great when it started.
That must have been well before the MS-DOS version I had to use.
Pegasus/Mercury were the biggest pieces of crap disguised as a mail system I ever had the displeasure of using (and I'm on a WinXP box with Outlook and Exchange right now). Offhand:
- it used some proprietary protocol, so you could only use the client with their server, and vice versa
- it was condescending: when it sent MIME messages, the text part said "if you can read this, upgrade to a new mail system like Pegasus that supports MIME!"
- it was buggy: I'd never seen a mail loop before Mercury
- it didn't use mbox format, and there was no program to convert its format to mbox (more vendor lock-in!)
- it was lacking on features, perhaps because it was proprietary and written by a single person
- it was lacking on usability
Then, as you say, "a Windows version emerged". We had high hopes for it, but it sucked even worse:
- it was just the MS-DOS version but with icons; it fixed no problems with the MS-DOS version, and instead of a button that said "SEND" you had a button with a tiny indecypherable icon on it (along with approximately 473 other tiny icons -- that's called "progress")
- it used MDI, which confused pretty much everybody (free tip: if your users are old MS-DOS users who have enough trouble with "windows", you really don't want to force them to think about "windows in windows")
- as a special case of "lacking in features", it had no facilities for spam filtering, long after everybody else did
If I had to name one good thing about Pegasus/Mercury, I wouldn't be able to. There was nothing good about it, and lots bad. The world is a better place without it.
You mean all those spammers using Pegasus didn't contribute money to its development?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
- My first email client was pmail. On a non-Internet connected IPX network.
- I got my first job using pmail... I wrote a stupid script to spam a friend of mine and got the sys-admin's attention. He hired me a couple months later.
It's sad to see it go... of course I wouldn't trade Gmail or Outlook for my child's right leg so it's not too sad.
original was for DOS, is still around, and able to do both POP/SMTP
As someone who used the DOS version since 1991 (and I removed it only a few months ago after several years of running it in parallel with WinPMail), I'm quite certain it did neither POP nor SMTP. However you could get gateways from 3rd parties that would gateway the DOS pegasus via POP and SMTP.
sdb
I used Pegasus Mail almost exclusively 1997-2002, when I switched all my e-mail & internet activity to *nix.
Thanks to David for Pegasus Mail.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
David Harris has certainly provided an excellent set of email tools for *many* years now (17?) *for free*, being supported financially by *optional* support contributions and sales of manual (any other means?)
Remembering from the 'old' days when I used to help run our dept novel server for 120+ users, his programs were better and safer than many out there for years, and has always had powerful features. (both the email clients and email server) They were certainly better than the expensive and crappy email options offered by Novell at the time. I'm sure they have heavily influenced all of the other email clients & servers by the powerful features they introduced as well as their strong emphasis on security. I'm very sorry to hear that financial support for it has dwindled to this point, and I'm very sorry to see pmail go.
David Harris certainly deserves our thanks and respect for his many years of work and of providing his software for free, not the carping and accusations of motive seen here. (which seems to be mostly by those who have never even used his software, or heard of it?)
Open source has some great advantages, (especially for the user who doesn't have to do any work) but, like David's current model of development, it doesn't offer any guarantee of an income. Not everyone can work for free, especially full-time. Before carping at him, feel free to assign your trust fund over to him first. ;-) ... or try walking a great many miles in his shoes...
I'm sure that setting up his software tools as open source projects would entail some significant amount of up-front work, and possibly continuing efforts. His code is his, and it's certainly *more* than fair to ask for financial support or compensation in order to donate it to the public domain, and to put even more time, expertise and effort into the transition.
Anyway, thanks David, for your many years of effort, excellent software, and your generousity in sharing it with us for free.
I'm sorry it had to end for you on the down note that the past few years have evidently been.
Disclaimer: Yes, I've used Pegasus Mail for many years, though I've been using thunderbird lately. We're still using Pmail at home. And yes, I've put my money where my mouth is, sending financial contributions to DH several times. (though smaller than I would have liked to be able to)
Shouldn't it be called Thundora?
rewriting history since 2109
I've been using Pegasus for over a decade. Still do.
But unless David changes his mind, it looks like the writing will be on the wall.
Thunderbird might be an alternative, but it still can't do some simple things, AFAIK:
1) Display multiple open folders at once
2) Let you select text in an email and only quote the selected text in a reply.
I converted my wife to use TBird a few months ago, and she's more or less OK with it. But she misses some Pegasus features as well.
I think I'll hold off till the dust settles and a new release of TBird comes out. Then I may have to bite the bullet if things haven't changed.
It'll be a shame. Pegasus has served me well for a very long time.
Chaeron Corporation
if funding becomes available he would consider open sourcing the code OR continuing developement. what a bunch of crap. If you open sourced your code you can still seek funding! btw, your code is not needed.
It's been plutoed.
(Ironic, for something named Mercury.)
..I'm not dead yet!
Sig: I stole this sig.
"Merely" and "just" (you used one of it) are good ways to subtract potential emotional value from a valid neutral point of view. Those prepositions allow to turn any kind of information into a shoddy shallow shadow of itself.
Furthermore, whether his intentions are "true" is irrelevant. He gave his written word (on Slashdot, mind you) for it, that should suffice. In case somebody would be able to raise some funding, I'm sure he wouldn't want to ruin his reputation by not standing up to what he's been proposing. However, his announcement lacks numbers.
Nevertheless, I'm a little pissed off that he considers open sourcing only as an act of desperation, but I guess that's the old-school spirit (hello Netscape!). In my opinion, open sourcing is not an option, it's a mandatory step to be taken seriously.
Merely my opinion.
Do not trust this signature.
If you have access to a server that supports IMAP you just set that up as a secondary account, create a working folder in there and copy Inbox, Outbox and whatever other folder you have to it.
:-).
Then set up new email client, set up the usual accounts and add the above IMAP account. Pull mail back into relevant folders, check if it all works OK and done - zap data and IMAP account. However, works best on a LAN if you got a large mail folder (best spin up a local Linux box if possible). 2GB mail folders, for example, are best not migrated via your average ADSL circuit
Alternatively, stay with IMAP - quite handy for use from multiple computers..
Insert
Euderbird has a certain ring to it
which is totally what she said
POP/SMTP was available through plugins, one of which was made by David Harris himself. See some of these here: Guide to Pegasus Mail Addons List.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Eudora will soon follow I'm sure
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
It was alright in the late 90s but I was never personally a big fan, even though I had to support it for a while. Who needs anything more than what Pine has to offer???
I've offered to pay him for stuff several times, he either turns me down or simply doesn't answer.
Doesn't trust me for some reason. Probably my winning personality... even though I have offered to sign whatever paperwork he wants, and have my employers do the same...
This is a prime example of why I sometimes hate doing any software development.
It isn't so bad when you get paid to listen to people complain but to have to put up with whining for free is just too much.
My guess is that David got tired of making less and less and having people complain more and more.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
After writing to the only email address I found on the Pegassus Mail web site, I got the following answer:
....apparently the design is the weak part... Maybe if the author gets payd for working on it as an OpenSource developer, the story can continue.
On Tue, January 9, 2007 11:24 am, Gabriel Menini wrote:
> > Dear David,
> >
> >
> > I've heard of the ceasement of Pegasus Mail.
> >
> >
> > I was wondering if you are planning to release this great masterpiece
> > under some OpenSource licence.
Doubtful. This software was never designed or developed for use by other and the
lack of documentation probably means that you'd have to spend years determining how
is worked. It would be easier to start from scratch.
> >
> > Thanks.
> > Best regards,
> >
> >
> > Gabriel
> >
> >
--
Pegasus Mail Electronic Mail Systems
Pegasus Mail Technical Support
Thomas R. Stephenson
Technical.Support@tstephenson.com
http://www.pmail.com
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